02.07.2019 20:50

I have had the iPhone 8 Plus for close to two years now.

One of problems with the iPhone prince increase with the release of the iPhone X was that my experience with owning an iPhone is that after about a year and a half the battery go to hell and they slowly become slower and slower. This was a big problem with the iPhone 4s (my favorite form factor by the way), and also the 5s; but to a lesser extent the 6s Plus, even though the battery got pretty bad like the previous models.

The iPhone 8 Plus is not slow in any way, and the performance feels more or less like it did when I got it. That means that we are beyond the days where software was limited by hardware performance. The battery on the other hand is a lot worse than it was, but still not as bad compared with previous phones.

As iPhone slowly becomes as expensive as a MacBook I expect them to be useful for as long. And at this point it seems like we are there. I can’t see much of a reason to upgrade every year or every second year. My current phone is perfectly fine, I’ll wait until it becomes too slow to be usable or until it breaks as always._

02.07.2019 13:12

If you have a Fuji camera like the X-Pro 2 or a X100, there is a
interesting application for OS X and Windows called Fuji RAW Studio.

It is very interesting. What it does is to give you a way to take raw
files you have on your hard drive and process them through your Fuji
camera as if you did it on the camera.

The advantage to this is that you can use their awesome presets, and
jpeg engine. But the limit is that you can only process the raw files
using the same hardware they were shot with.

I use it when I change my mind about a preset, later on. My current
process have changed from only shooting raw and using Lightroom to
shooting JPEG + RAW and just importing JPEGs out of the camera into
photos. And if I want to change something I re-process using RAW Studio.

01.07.2019 09:21

JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ, TeamCity and a bunch of other really
awesome tools.

I do C# development at work, on average it is probably 50⁄50 C#/SQL
backend work and Frontend work using React and Javascript.

I’d prefer to do all of it in Emacs, but because of how we work on the
backend(a lot of different libraries, services etc) it is not really
convenient to use a regular text editor.

Since he beginning of 2019, I have used Rider almost exclusively. I
launch Visual Studio only when I’m just going to build and publish
something without a publish profile. Other than that I use Rider for
everything. It is faster, performs a lot better on all projects not
matter how large or small. The plug-in system doesn’t grind the whole IDE
to a halt.

Almost everything in Rider is a little bit nicer. It is stable, starts
fast, shows you some kind of other “I’m working” indicator than a
windows “Not responding” alert.

The reason I actually switched to Rider, except for the speed thing, is
that if you take something that is a little bit of a pain, like picking
the correct process to debug. This is a real bitch in Visual Studio (you
always end up debugging all dotnet processes) in Rider you can pick
based on the DLL.

Two things that I don’t think is better though:

You will end up re-configuring a lot of targets between projects. I
wish some of it was a little bit easier to set up.

The package manager for nuget isn’t awesome. It works once you get
used to it. But the one in Visual Studio is better.

As of late February and I still use it most of the time. And I’m not
seeing back.

01.07.2019 09:13

WSL or Windows Subsystem for Linux is a way to run Linux under Windows with native like performance. I have used it some, and it is great, but there is no support for GUI stuff, and some stuff like fish just doesn’t work.

I think it is really cool, and it would be really awesome if Docker on Windows (the linux kind not the one that tries to make Docker images of Windows software) would use it to run Docker itself.

But I miss some real integration between the two operating systems. Like being able to install a Linux emacs inside Arch and run it like a regular Windows app and being able to interact with both stuff inside the VM and things inside windows. If not it is mostly just stuff we have seen before, in a different package.

30.06.2019 20:25

After trying to use cabled headphones with current iPhone models, caved
after trying more or less everything else and bought a bluetooth DAC:
the Fiio BTR3.

The problem with using cabled headphones is that you need some kind of
converter dongle or bluetooth DAC. When you use a dongle, it basically
disconnects with the most movement. And that is really annoying when you
like to do stuff on your phone while listening to stuff. Especially
while walking around when I travel from home to work.

So I decided to get a DAC, after using both the Apple dongle and a few
others including one from Belkin.

It’s great, it is like a little bit larger than a USB thumb drive.
Charges over USB-C; I also think you can connect it to a computer and
use it as a DAC over the USB-C.

The battery life covers a full day for me. Easy to connect and manage.
It has some annoying sounds when you power it on and off. And I’d love
it to not have it’s own power level. But other than that great.

No regrets about getting it.

What I like about having a separate bluetooth device is that even though
it’s not a lot cheaper together, you can upgrade things as it makes
sense for you. And the cabled headphone market is a lot bigger than the
bluetooth one.

30.06.2019 20:23

I have written about this before, and I’m doing it again because I think
it is important.

When you are going to buy something, have a sue for it, a reason for you
owning it before you buy it.

I see a lot of cool pens each month, but I never buy any of them
compared to how many I see. I get maybe one pen a year.

Like when I got the YStudio pen I got it because I thought it would be a
great pocket pen. I know a lot of people just buy stuff and try to find
a way it is useful when they have it. Every time I have done that it
have ended up being something I have at my desk, until I put it away
somewhere gathering dust until I throw it out.

But if I wait until I see “X would be really great for Y” then it
usually end up being muc more producutive. Somtime I don’t continue
using it after a while. But I have a thing I want to test it out for by
the point it show up in mail.

19.06.2019 18:50

My MacBook Escape will hopefully be back home tomorrow. I handed it in to the largest Apple Norwegian Premium Reseller, and I think they are the official repair place for most Apple products in Norway.

What happened was that my MacBook have had some issues booting the last few months, but jumping into recovery and a repair drive usually fixed it. Then in the beginning of June it refused to boot at all, but it worked fine to boot with my SuperDuper clone. So I handed it in. My hunch was that the drive was dead.

I have received some updates from the technician as they have been looking into it, and they made it clear that it will all be covered by Apple, not because of warranty but because of customer protection laws in the EU (plus EFTA etc). First they ordered a new logic board (plus keyboard, trackpad and battery, and the casing around the keyboard etc; all of that is one “part” apparently). Then they found out that they also had to replace the drive.

My guess was that it was just the drive that was broken, but I’m not going to complain about them giving me all the guts of a new machine for free, and I get to keep my stickers.

But I think Apple have lost a lot of money on this machine, because first I got a new machine when the keyboard broke, and now they replace most of the hardware again.

Now, I also have some worries about this whole “your computer is basically three parts” strategy. It probably makes sense for Apple, when they have to pay for it. But lets say someone got a MacBook Pro in 2016 and it works fine, but they want a new battery in 2021, and they’re told: you have to replace more or less everything inside this computer to do that. How do you think they react?

I guess they have reasons, but there got to be a way for us, the consumers to replace stuff without having to pay for half a computer, either through them being able to recycle the parts or something.